I recently came across a post on a site called The Burning Platform that I could have written myself — and it’s not often I can say that. The site’s anonymous administrator begins his analysis thus:
The takeover of the country by an amalgamation of bad characters representing fascist corporatism, collectivism, billionaire oligarchs, social media tyrants, pandemic peddlers, and Deep State snake oil surveillance state salesmen has marked a turning point for the country. Battle lines are being drawn, a propaganda war is already being waged, enemies are preparing for conflict, rage is rising, and the country is headed towards some level of dissolution.
The author goes on to document how a virus with a high survival rate was weaponized to control the masses, how the election was engineered to ensure the desired outcome (Time magazine now admits this out in the open), and how the entire system works in tandem to silence dissent and force mass compliance.
“The feeling among millions of Americans is they have either been abandoned, stabbed in the back, or robbed,” the author writes. “They aren’t exactly sure who to blame, who to trust, or who to fight, but they are trying to figure out the best course of action, given the current circumstances.”
I think anyone who isn’t a brain-dead sheep feels this way right now. Granted, there are a lot of brain-dead sheep out there. But among those of us who still use our mental faculties, surely most of us feel this sense of being stuck, not knowing what to do next.
The author makes a compelling case that “hubris, arrogance and pride are always the Achilles heel of sociopaths” — and make no mistake; we are ruled by sociopaths — and then cites the premise of the ’80s movie War Games, in which a computer reasons that in a potential nuclear standoff between America and Russia, “the only winning move is not to play.”
That’s where I really started paying attention, because I regularly get myself worked up into a lather over these totalitarian goons, and even more so over the masses of clueless idiots who cheer them on.
But that means the goons and idiots are still in control, because I’m letting them control my reactions.
So how do you fight back when every major institution of power is stacked against you? People like to say “just wait until the midterms,” but as long as the game continues to be rigged, the ballot box is useless.
What you do, then, is simply refuse to play their game.
If you go nuclear on them, you hand them the excuse they wanted to bring down the hammer on you. Just look at how the Capitol incident — when most of the people stayed between the velvet ropes, took selfies with cops, waved flags and banners, and stood around chanting stuff — has been manipulated to demonize half the country as “domestic terrorists.” Can you imagine how hard the goons would come down on all of us if there ever actually was an attempted armed insurrection? You’d see an unprecedented propaganda blitz, with the government, the media, corporate monopolies, the financial system, and all the alphabet-soup Deep State agencies united in a massive crackdown on anyone who even hinted at straying from The Narrative.
But the goons expect your compliance. And if you don’t comply, they expect that your fear of punishment will quickly push you back in line. Hence every person who writes a groveling apology for the horrible and detestable things he said, like a hostage reading at gunpoint from a prepared script, in hopes that the Woke Ayatollahs will show him some tiny semblance of mercy and not cancel his entire existence.
And so what we end up looking at is a type of passive-aggressive protest against the ruling elites. If they control the money and the power, and there’s no possible way to beat them in a head-on violent confrontation, then what you do is simply withdraw your consent.
How that looks depends on what each individual person’s circumstances allow him or her to do. You can try any or all of the following:
- Refuse to do business with companies that promote any agenda you oppose. That includes getting off Facebook and any other social media company that harvests your personal data when it suits their financial purposes and then bans you when you’ve outlived your usefulness and your truth threatens their narrative control.
- Get out of banks and use credit unions.
- Buy locally to the greatest extent possible, depriving big corporations that control our lives of your revenue.
- Use cash when possible and stay out of debt — or if you do end up in debt, just default and let the greedy corporate leeches that already hate you take a little bit of a financial hit. They’ll start offering you new credit cards in a few years anyway.
- Barter with your neighbors.
- Learn new skills to increase your self-sufficiency.
- Build local friendships and networks, so you have a support community to fall back on in hard times.
- Get off the grid as much as you can. Leave the city. Buy property. Raise your own food on a farm.
- When you need routine medical care, seek out an osteopath, a naturopath, or anyone who treats the whole body, looks for underlying causes, promotes natural remedies, and doesn’t push Big Pharma drugs as a cure-all.
- Learn how to use online encrypted communications services. Use Tor and/or a VPN. Use an alias when you’re able.
- Go old school and buy yourself some high-powered two-way radios, get a ham radio license, or just keep a landline phone active.
- Hide as much of your income as you can, to minimize the government’s claim over your livelihood. Or become a tax resistor altogether, if you can stomach the potential consequences.
- Buy a gun and pray you never have to use it.
Basically, do everything the survivalists and preppers always told you to do.
And do your best to be the Gray Man while you go about your daily acts of resistance. Don’t stand out. Don’t wear political gear or put bumper stickers on your car. Don’t be the tall blade of grass that gets mown down or the nail sticking out of the board that gets hammered into place. Make it as hard as possible for those in power to pick you out of a crowd.
A good shorthand tip: Read 1984, to understand what you’re up against, and then The Art of War to know how to beat your enemy at his own game.
On the other hand, if you’re willing and able to risk it, individual and small-scale protests can be effective, too. I’m not a fan of big protests, because it’s too easy for a few people who get out of line to ruin it for everyone, and even easier for those in power to infiltrate an event and deliberately cause trouble. Then you just become the ruling elites’ eternal excuse for ramped-up crackdowns (see again the Capitol protest).
But it’s much harder to stop small acts of defiance. Where I live, for example, I go about my life as if there was no mask mandate, and most people say nothing. Granted, I live in an area where doing so doesn’t raise much of a stink in the first place, but imagine what would happen if everyone just said no and went bare-faced into stores and restaurants everywhere. The authorities can’t fine and arrest everyone, now, can they?
Just look at what happened in Italy, as thousands of restaurateurs said no to the latest round of business lockdowns and opened their doors, with enforcement cops being chased out of several establishments.
"Civil disobedience" tonight in Milan as Italians sick of the Coronavirus lockdown, reopened restaurants anyway& full of customers enjoying life again. Police tried to prevent it but were outnumbered and chased off by the customers. @MoriartyProfJ @JamesDelingpole @simondolan pic.twitter.com/X05ySepPdw— AnnaAC (@Anna_A_C) January 16, 2021
And that’s the whole key to this kind of protest. The ruling elites can only rule because you consent to their rule. If you withdraw your consent, you strip away their power.
So it may not seem like much for one person to pay cash and stop supporting big corporations, but if thousands do it, and then millions, what do you think is going to happen? The ruling elites rely on force to keep you in line. What are they going to do if you don’t give them a target to strike at?
This is the essence of Thoreau’s civil disobedience. It’s how Gandhi took down the British empire in India without firing a shot. It’s how Dr. King posthumously prevailed in his battle for civil rights.
Power structures only understand violence. Their entire existence relies on the use of force to make you comply. If you retaliate with violence, you play right into their hands. But if you engage in passive nonviolence, they don’t know what to do. And if you’re persistent enough, you can wear them down and win.
The next best thing you can do to resist is to start talking to people who are different from you. Get out of your echo chamber. Find out what you have in common with your neighbors, and brainstorm on ways to work together based on those common interests and goals. The one thing that those in power fear most is the unity of the people. They have a vested interest in keeping us at each other’s throats, because it takes our eyes off the real enemy.
I remind you of what the ruling grasshoppers said of the ants in A Bug’s Life:
I was struck recently by a speech from Magnus Panvidya, a member of the Boogaloo movement, who made a similar call for left-right unity at the Michigan state capitol in January. The speech also made an impact on left-leaning commentator Jimmy Dore, who ran the video on his YouTube channel and interviewed Magnus himself. (Magnus’s speech at the capitol starts at around 3:25, if you want to jump right to it.)
What was so telling about the interview was the reaction to it. Magnus spent the entire video explaining how his movement was not a violent, racist, far-right white supremacist militia, as it’s typically portrayed in the media, and even in supposedly “objective” sources like Wikipedia, but rather a decentralized group of Second Amendment-supporting anarchists and libertarians who seek allies from across the political spectrum. According to Magnus, the Boogs have even offered armed support at BLM and Antifa rallies. Their goal, more than anything, appears to be to build unity across political lines, to defend constitutional liberties and the right of people to live their lives in peace as they wish, and to prepare for armed conflict as a last resort, if things go south. Magnus himself, sitting in front of a rainbow-colored Gadsden flag, told Jimmy that he was personally pro-LGBT, antiwar, anti-racism, anti-police brutality, and anti-ICE detention.
After all that, a significant segment of the media simply doubled down on mischaracterizing the Boogs the same way they’d already been doing, and then attacked Jimmy Dore for giving the guy a platform.
Why? Because their continued power depends on keeping you ignorant of the fact that unity among the people is possible. The media would rather lie to your face and make you fear Magnus Panvidya and the Boogaloo movement than run the risk that you’ll wake up and see that the real fight is not right vs. left, but us vs. them — the people vs. those in power.
I wrote to Magnus and asked if he’d be willing to do a Q&A for this blog. So far I’ve received no response. But search his name on YouTube, and you’ll find plenty of interviews he’s done recently. Watch and make up your own mind — and know that you probably really do have more in common with the ordinary people around you than you could ever have guessed.
I wish I could do more to help build a resistance movement, but I’m limited in what I can do, as are most of us in one way or another. In my case, my health isn’t great, I’m my family’s sole provider, and I have a child to help raise and homeschool. And even though I use an alias here and elsewhere online, I’ve left my bread crumbs online in the past, and anyone with the most rudimentary computer skills could figure out who I am if he or she wanted to. So I stick my neck out even writing about current events in the censorious cancel-culture climate we live in.
But if we want change, we all have to do something. And even if we can’t do much, collectively our small actions can be enough to take down even the most powerful of empires.
May the ants prevail.
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